Managing Overcrowding: Corrections Aministrators And The Prison Crisis

Abstract

Prison overcrowding has become an increasingly urgent problem confronting state governments in the 1980s. This paper provides a detailed description of the causes and effects of overcrowding as viewed by the agencies with the most direct responsibility for dealing with it, state corrections departments. Top-level correctional administrators in the fifty states were asked about the standards they used to define prison capacity, the factors they saw as causing institutional overcrowding, the effects overcrowding was having on their organization and the responses to the problem being made in their state. They were also questioned about the roles played by a variety of potential constituents in relation to their agencies. The results of the survey show that, according to these respondents, overcrowding is having serious negative effects on corrections personnel and physical facilities and that building new institutions is the solution to the problem with the most widespread support among administrators. Governors were the policy actors most frequently reported to be important supporters of corrections.